Page 58 of Flirting with Darkness

A hysterical wave of sympathy passed over me—because he, like me, struggled to understand human nature. Maybe we were both so bad at it that my entire town would perish because of it.

“Is that all we are to you?” I said. “Animals? Would you waste the lives of animals the way you have wasted the lives of the people you have killed here?”

Vitarus’s face went cold.

“You speak to me of waste,” he sneered. “The blood of one of my acolytes has spilled here. You stink of the bitch who betrayed me. I have fed your people for millennia. Sheltered you. Given you purpose. And yet you spurn me. Disrespect me.” He looked around, lip curled in disgust. “I never understood the others’ fondness for your kind. What would spring from this soil if this miserable assemblage of stone and wood wasn’t here? Perhaps I should prefer to see that.” He let out a low laugh. It sounded like the wind through the trees. “That is the mistake of my kin. Assuming that humans are more interesting than any of the other millions of forms of life in this world. No. You are no more interesting. Simply more trouble.”

His gaze fell back to me, and whatever he saw in my face made him laugh again, mockingly.

“You should see your face, little girl. Such hatred.” He plucked one of the roses from one of the bushes and twirled it between his fingers. The petals rustled and flourished, multiplying until they fell gently to the soil, the vine of the stem wrapping around his arm. “A flower doesn’t hate. It fulfills its function, and then returns to the earth without a fuss.”

I did hate him. I wanted to spit in his face and curse at him and strike him. If only killing a god was as easy as killing his acolyte.

But the thought of Mina flashed through my mind. Farrow, and the wild risks he had taken for me. My people, and the illness that would devour them all. And then the thought of Vale, and I prayed that he was far away by now from the grasp of gods that resented him.

I hated Vitarus. But what I felt for them was stronger than my hatred.

No, I couldn’t kill a god. I couldn’t appease him with empty apologies. I certainly couldn’t move his heart to compassion.

But…

“I’ll make a deal with you,” I blurted out.

Vitarus paused, his interest piqued.

Gods weren’t compassionate or logical. But they were bored. They liked games, liked bargains.

I didn’t let my hope show as his head tilted, a slow smile spreading over his lips.

“Ah, just like your father,” he said. “You know, he made a deal with me a long time ago, too.”

22

Adeal?

My mind grabbed onto those words and didn’t let go.

A deal.

Not a punishment. An exchange.

It seemed like such a small distinction, and yet it reframed everything I knew of what had happened between my father and Vitarus that day. The story I had told myself for fifteen years—that my father had cursed his god, and by terrible chance, that god had decided to curse him right back—was false.

My father had made a choice.

Betrayal skewered me.

“A deal.” The word was scratchy in my throat. “He made a deal with you.”

Vitarus’s eyes glinted with interest, peeking through his boredom like sun through the clouds. “You did not know?”

I said nothing, but I didn’t need to speak for a god to know my answer.

He laughed, the sound rain on the fields. “You came here hating me for my cruelty. But how your heart changes when you realize it was your own father who damned your people.”

He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. He…

But my fingers closed around the branches of the rose bushes, thorns coaxing blood to my fingertips.

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